Security
by Caladria101
Summary: Oh, yeah. He was up to something. SJEstablished. Tiniest spoiler for LitS, but nothing of any significance. Concrit is for life, not just for Christmas...


The smirking really should have given it away.

And the lack of comment – Jack was nothing but vocal in protesting about her working on their rare weekends together.

Their rare weekend spent continuously in each other's company, anyway. They spent lots of weekends together – it's just that the vast majority of them involved one of them sat around in either D.C. or the Springs waiting for the other to get home from work.

So she really wanted to know why he didn't seem bothered about her picking up her laptop. She only wanted to make a note of something that had just occurred to her so she didn't forget, but he didn't know that. And yet, he was sprawled across the other end of his couch, channel hopping, deliberately not looking in her direction and smirking.

It was quite worrying.

She frowned slightly as the laptop finished booting and her fingers flew over the keyboard as she looked at him searchingly.

"What?" he asked, the picture of innocence.

Oh, yeah. He was up to something.

She shook her head in dismissal of his question and absently laid a hand on the foot that'd crept onto her lap, turning back to the task in hand.

Hang on.

Password not accepted.

Her head whipped round. "Jack…" she said warningly.

"Sam."

"What've you done?"

"I'm spending the weekend with you…" he answered with an undertone of long suffering patience.

"You've reset the password on my laptop," she said accusingly.

"Actually, I've reset all of them…" he muttered under his breath, half hoping that she wouldn't hear but being unable to resist.

The look on her face suggested that she'd heard.

"What to?"

He smirked. "Well where's the fun in that?"

She looked at her laptop for a long moment.

"How did you know what the _old_ passwords were, anyway?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her irritation, as she started idly typing in random words as she spoke.

H-O-M-E-R…. S-I-M-P-S-O-N-S… T-H-E-S-I-M-P-S-O-N-S…

"Well, I've seen you type 'em in," he pointed out, the smirk growing wider each time she failed to gain access.

"It was random numbers," she protested.

"It was my Social…" he said, staring at her like she'd gone mad.

She stared at him. "You're kidding… You're not kidding," she said as she compared the two numbers mentally. That was… weird. "I didn't even realise," she told him.

The smirk changed to a genuine smile, erasing some of the lines of worry that he seemed to carry since he'd started working at the Pentagon. He regarded her with a depth of feeling that she never thought she'd see so openly directed at her.

"Huh. Guess I'm just a bad influence on ya," he said lightly, breaking the moment and picking up the remote again.

She smiled and turned back to her laptop, muttering under her breath, "Always have been."

Half an hour later, she'd got into her lab notes (egghead) and her other SGC stuff (orifice, which had earned the culprit a disgusted look – "It just sounds… _wrong_!").

She only had one more password left on the thing.

"You didn't."

"Didn't what?" he replied, looking up from his programme.

"Hack into my personal files." There was stuff there that she actually didn't want him to see. Like the letters. The number of them had grown over the years, and most of them had changed dramatically. There'd been a few deleted from the list, as well, she thought, thinking of Janet and her Dad. It wasn't that she didn't want him to see his per se, but most of the others there – okay all of the others there – had an instruction to "look out for Jack", or at least words to that effect (well, except for Mark's, anyway – there were some thing she didn't want to push too far.)

And that, she suspected, would not be appreciated.

"Kinda. Sorta." He winced. "I didn't peek!"

He hadn't, she realised, looking at him. And there weren't many out there who wouldn't have. She smiled. "I love you."

Which neither of them said very often, nearly a decade of silence being too deeply ingrained, and still neither of them comfortable enough with outright declarations to make it a common occurrence. And this time had the double effect of completely confusing him.

His mouth hung slightly open as he stared at her in bafflement. "Not that I'm complaining or anything, but what..?"

She couldn't help the grin that spread. There were days when it just so good to make him look at her like that. "You tell me, and I'll tell you," she told him.

He sat up, then, taking the laptop from her lap and placing it carefully on the floor before taking both of her hands in his.

"Carter… If I actually told you, you would kick my ass from here to Ne'tu and _leave_ me there. You _hate_ being told the answer, and you've had more fun figuring those things out than you'll ever admit to. You won't even let me do your crosswords…"

"Celestial body – Uma Thurman ring a bell?"

"…And you will never let me live that down, even though my _brain_ was being rewritten, and you don't even care, and you just do it to torture me, and you _know_ that she's not my favourite…"

She looked at him. He looked at her.

"Mary Steenburgen," she said a beat before he did. "Bet you wouldn't do this to _her_," she said, reaching down to pick up her laptop. He'd moved to her end of the couch now, almost touching but not quite, so she heard when he muttered under his breath.

"There's a _lot_ I do to you that I wouldn't do to Mary Steenburgen."

She kissed him. He wasn't sure why, but when Sam kissed him 'why?' was never at the top of his list of thoughts. Actually, when Sam kissed him, his list of thoughts vanished at light speed. But there was something off about this…

"Carter, stop thinkin' about that damn password!"

"Hint?"

"No! And seriously, Simpson's marathon on TV… you know you can't resist the power of Homer…" he said enticingly.

She just looked at him for a second before returning to her bout of code cracking. So… logically speaking... all the rest of them had had passwords that in some way related to their content, and they were all certified Jackisms. So… something personal…?

She glared at him craning over to try and see what she was typing before angling the laptop so he couldn't see the keyboard.

"Hey! I wanted to see what you were typing."

She smiled sweetly at him, and, lifting her feet onto the couch, rested them against his hipbone so he couldn't come closer.

Which was fine, until he started tickling her feet. The really ticklish part of her feet. The part that made her want to squirm and giggle. And he _knew_ it. Bastard. She tried to kick his hands away, which only served to make him chuckle and resume his activities with even more vigour.

"Still thinkin' about passwords?" he said slyly.

"Yes," she lied, quickly typing in L-O-V-E-Y-O-U before he could see her do it.

Password not accepted. Well, she wouldn't have expected it to be that, but you couldn't blame a girl for trying.

S-A-M-O-N-E-I-L-L also came up blank, as did every other permutation of that.

And watching Jack - who'd retreated to his own end of the couch and was yet again sprawled over everything, including her – didn't help, because watching Jack and trying to figure out how his mind worked just ended up being watching Jack watch TV, which was in no way helpful to her. And he kept catching her doing it.

"Whatcha lookin' at?"

Just like that. "The most irritating thing in this galaxy," she replied, narrowing her eyes at him before returning to the laptop and the taunting screen. She was not going to give him room for a comeback.

"You're only sayin' that 'cos McKay's in Atlantis."

Her head shot up, but the only view she got was Jack watching Homer strangle Bart as if he'd never said a word.

Maybe there was another way to do this.

She put the laptop on the coffee table and slid it in front of Jack's head. He looked at her quizzically. She ignored him, shifting until she was lying next to him on the couch yet still able to reach the laptop.

He leaned over her, shifting the laptop slightly. "TV," he offered as explanation, before resting his head on her shoulder to watch.

That… did not help any. Nor did the fact that he'd looped an arm round her waist and his legs were becoming more and more entangled with hers.

"So.. hint?" she asked,

"Nope."

"Please?"

"Nope."

"Jack!"

"Nope! Err… yeah?"

He was looking at her with that hopeful, cocky grin on his face (and she didn't know how he managed to amalgamate those two, but she sure as hell wasn't complaining, not when it was directed at her and god, she needed to stop thinking this _now_).

"Hint?"

"You'll figure it out," he said absently, distracted by the announcement of the "All New Simpson's". He watched for a few seconds before turning to her again. "So... I was thinkin' – don't give me that look – that I have some leave… and you have some leave… so maybe we should… leave?" He was considering her carefully, though what he was thinking she had no idea.

But her left hand had started typing of its own accord.

C-A-B-I-N…. M-I-N-N-E-S-

"Come on, you think I can _spell_ Minnesota?"

She gave him a look. Her standard I-know-you're-not-stupid-and-if-you-keep-saying-you-are-I'll-kick-your-ass look. It'd always impressed Jack that she could fit so much into one look.

F-I-S-H-I-N-G

And suddenly the screen changed.

That was… He was an asshole, doing that to her, she shouldn't forget that, but she had to admit, he'd managed to keep both of them amused for an afternoon – not that, she considered, he normally had a problem with that.

But "fishing"? Fishing was…everything. That was incredibly… wow.

"So, what's in the one with my name on it?" Jack asked, reaching for the laptop. She slapped his hand away. There were times when she had to wonder if he was breaking the moment because it made him uncomfortable, or if he anticipated discomfort, or if, this time at least, he was genuinely unaware of the moment.

She sighed. "A letter."

The vaguely gesturing hand suggested that she should expand her terse explanation. "It's … just in case."

The look in his eye suggested that he knew exactly what 'just in case' meant. She regarded him for a moment. His letters had always been the shortest of all her letters, even way back in the beginning when she'd started doing this. They'd changed dramatically, as well.

"Carter…" he drawled, almost. "Whatcha thinkin'?"

She looked at him. "I am so glad that yours doesn't have 'I love you' in it anymore."

His look was everything. "Makes two of us," he replied, wrapping his arm around her firmly as if to ward off anything that might try to take her. She clung back for a second, just revelling in the thought that she could do that simple thing, before reaching out and opening the document.

He stared at it for a moment. "Not any more," he promised fervently.

He let the moment hang, before grinning at her. "Did I ever tell you how big the fish grew?"

She sighed. Breaking the moment was his thing, she knew, but still… She thumped him lightly. "You showed me," she said pointedly. "Several times."

"_This_ big?" he asked, holding his arms apart.

She gave him a look. "Don't flatter yourself," she said dryly.


End file.
